How many trees had to be cut down to make the newspaper you are now reading? This is an interesting question and one you hear asked fairly often, especially by those persons advocating recycling to conserve our natural resources.

For many years we have heard the statistic that "a ton of recycled paper saves 17 trees." The "17 trees" number was popularized by Conservatree when it was a paper distributor. This number was based on a report to Congress in the 1970s and was calculated for newsprint, which is made in a totally different papermaking process than office and printing papers. It was the best number anyone had, so it became the number everyone used to calculate the number of trees saved by recycled paper or the number of trees that had to be cut to make virgin paper, no matter what type of paper they were talking about.

Paper is actually made from a mix of types of trees. Some are hardwood and some are softwood. In addition, some are tall, some old, some wide, some young, some thin. Many of the "trees" used to make paper are just chips and sawdust. In addition, there are many types of paper, not just newsprint.

How can one talk about a "typical tree"? Do numbers calculated 30 years ago still apply to today's much more efficient paper industry? There are no simple answers to these questions, and any calculations that can be made would be no better than "ballpark estimates."

To determine these estimates, you have to first determine what kind of paper you are talking about. Newsprint, telephone directories, low-cost magazines, and catalog papers are made from a "groundwood" process. This process is about twice as efficient as paper made in the "kraft" or "free-sheet" process which is used for higher quality office and printing papers, letterheads, business cards, copy papers, magazines, catalogs, advertising papers, and offset papers.

Is the paper "coated" or "uncoated"? The fiber in coated papers, such as those used for magazines and catalogs, usually have a clay coating that may be glossy or matte. Paper may be only about one-half of the entire sheet, because the clay coating makes up so much of the weight of the paper.

How many trees would make a ton of paper? According to research that was done at the Pulp and Paper Technology Program at the University of Maine, it was calculated that based on a mixture of softwoods and hardwoods 40 feet tall and 6 to 8 inches in diameter, it would take a rough average of 24 trees to produce a ton of printing and writing paper using the free-sheet pulping process. If we assume that the groundwood process is about twice as efficient, then we can estimate that it takes about 12 trees to make a ton of newsprint.

I weighed last week's Thursday edition of The Robesonian, and it weighed slightly more than 4 ounces. The paper you are reading today probably weighs about the same amount. It takes about 4 of these papers to weigh a pound or about 8,000 of them to weigh a ton. Using these numbers, if it takes 12 trees to make a ton of paper, 1 tree would make 167 pounds of paper or 668 Thursday editions of The Robesonian. Calculating even further, it would take 1/668 or 0.0015 trees to make the paper you are now reading.

Now you can begin to see the advantage of recycling your old newspapers, especially if you want to "save a tree." If you assume that today's edition of The Robesonian is an average weight for all newspapers you receive during the year, then if you recycle all of your copies of The Robesonian for almost 2 years, you will save 1 tree. If you can get a bunch of your friends to join you in your recycling efforts, together you may be able to save 1 tree every month or so.

The Robesonian is rather thin when compared to papers like The News & Observer,New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. If you subscribe to 1 of these papers, you can save a bunch of trees in 2-years' time.

I have probably used enough mathematics in this column, but if you are intrigued about these numbers, please consider these additional statistics. It takes 24 trees to make 1 ton of uncoated virgin (nonrecycled) printing and office paper. A "pallet" of copier paper contains 40 cartons and weighs 1 ton which means that 1 carton uses .6 trees. Another way to look at this is that 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copier paper or 8,333.3 sheets. One ream (500 sheets) uses 6 percent of 1 tree.

One ton of coated, higher-end virgin magazine paper, such as is used for magazines like National Geographic, uses 15.8 trees. One ton of coated, lower-end virgin magazine paper, used for newsmagazines and most catalogs, uses 7.68 trees.

E-mail address: Everett_Davis@ncsu.edu

Mailing Address:
P. O. Box 2280
Lumberton, NC 28359-2280

Phone: 910-671-3276
Fax: 910-671-6278

Date Created 09/12/01